No place for Depp

I'm sure most ladies in their middle years lie awake dreaming of George Clooney or Johnny Depp. But I lay awake tussling with vegetable rotation and where to plant what next spring. I know the mantra handed down by generations of gardeners should ideally be split into four sections. I can chant "roots with onions, brassicas, legumes and potatoes all interspaced with catch crops like lettuce" in my sleep and I probably do. But I can't manage to carry the plan out in reality.

It would be so easy if I could divide my vegetable beds into four large plots. But, like most gardeners, I have to work round permanent plantings of asparagus, fruit bushes, rhubarb and various herbs.

I know why I'm meant to rotate, too: "To lessen soil-borne diseases, to confuse pests and to spread out the nutrients." I also know that if you plant carrots in the same spot year after year the crop dwindles.

I look at master plans with pretty rectangular boxes coloured in and they are as meaningful as a train timetable in Japanese on the Tokyo rush hour - and I speak from experience!

No, I have to bodge it under the watchful gaze of the pedantic Best Beloved, a man who can turn anything into a statistical exercise.

I have to map my vegetable growing areas every year to remember where I planted things. Then I make a new plan, and then it falls apart. The stumbling block is - yes, you've guessed it - the British weather. The whole thing seems to pivot on two crops, the broad bean and the first early potato, being out of the ground on time.

Broad beans should have been harvested by the end of June, leaving a gap for a later crop, whether it's leeks or a winter brassica.

Last year I was still picking broad beans in August after a spring sowing that was checked, first by a warm spring and then by cold, wet weather. So they held up the winter brassicas and they flopped all over the parsnips.

The answer, of course, is an early broad bean crop from an autumn sowing. But I've abandoned autumn sowing because the mice and slugs, spurred into action by our ever warmer winters, devour them.

But I will try to give you some words of wisdom. Onions are shallow-rooted, hungry feeders and it's worth planting your sets on newly manured or enriched ground.

However, lots of root crops, including carrots, are not too happy on newly manured soil and they fork. So I plant my shallot and onion sets in a sunny position on newly enriched soil in a different place every year. This avoids various soil-borne onion diseases. I also rotate the root crops - carrots and beetroot, in my case - on to a different plot every year - one that hasn't been enriched.

I also move legumes - peas and beans - yearly. Their roots have nitrogen-fixing nodules which enrich the soil, but only if their roots are in the ground for three months. I often plant beetroot and carrots after legume crops. When it comes to first early potatoes I also move these to discourage scab and blight. Winter and spring brassicas also get moved yearly. The rest have to fit round. Not perfect but such is life.